The Crew on the Ladder

We do one thing, and we'd rather do it properly than do six things adequately. Rain lands on your roof, runs into the gutter, down the downspout and away from the house — and our job is making sure none of that chain is blocked, sagging or pouring down the wall instead.

It isn't difficult work. It is fussy work, and it's the kind that shows up months later if somebody rushed it.

Victoria rooflines are not all the same roofline

A 1912 house in Fairfield with three dormers and a pair of valleys is a different afternoon from a flat-run bungalow in Esquimalt, and both are different again from a tall newer build up in Langford. We price and plan around the house in front of us rather than a standard rate card.

The trees decide a lot of it too. Douglas fir and cedar drop needles that mat into a wet felt and simply will not flush out — they have to come up by hand. Garry oak drops late and drops acorns, which stop dead at the first downspout elbow. Bigleaf maple sends down heavy seed keys in spring. Arbutus sheds all year and never gives you a clean window to work with.

After a decade of it, you stop guessing about which of those you're dealing with. You can tell from the driveway.

You'll hear what we found up there

Clearing the debris is the job. But standing at the roof edge, we can see a fair bit that's invisible from the lawn — a hanger starting to pull out of soft fascia, a seam beginning to weep, a run that's dipped just enough to hold water, a downspout that gurgles and backs up.

We'll tell you about it. That is not a lead-in to a sales pitch — it's so the decision is yours and not a surprise next February. If it does need attention, gutter repair is something we handle; if it can wait a season, we'll say that instead.

How we work out a price

There's no single number for a gutter clean, because there's no single house. What moves it is the length of the runs, how many storeys, how much has packed in since the last visit, how the roof is laid out, and whether we can actually get a ladder to the far side.

That last one catches people out. Plenty of the older lots in James Bay and Fernwood have a side gap too narrow to walk a ladder through, so the back run has to be reached another way — and that's worth knowing before we quote, not after we arrive.

Send the address and we'll come back with a free quote. You'll have the figure before anything is booked.

Locally owned, and easy to deal with

We're insured and WCB-registered, we guarantee the work, and we've been doing this on the south Island for over ten years. Beyond that, our idea of good service is fairly unglamorous: turn up when we said, keep you in the loop, mind the garden, take the debris with us, and leave the place tidier than we found it.

Sorted properly once a year, gutters are the sort of thing you get to stop thinking about. That's really the whole offer.